From: Mike '/m' 


http://news.com.com/2010-1071_3-5065289.html

===
Now that SCO faces the dissolution of its legal position, claiming to
"enforce intellectual property rights" while actually massively
infringing the rights of others, the company and its lawyers have
jettisoned even the appearance of legal responsibility.

Last week's Wall Street Journal carried statements by Mark Heise, outside
counsel for SCO, challenging the "legality" of the Free Software
Foundation's GNU General Public License (GPL). The GPL both protects
against the baseless claims made by SCO for license fees to be paid by
users of free software and prohibits SCO from its ongoing distribution of
the Linux kernel, a distribution which infringes the copyrights of
thousands of contributors to the kernel throughout the world.

As IBM's recently filed counterclaim for copyright infringement and
violation of the GPL shows, the GPL is the bulwark of the community's legal
defense against SCO's misbehavior. So, naturally, one would expect SCO to
bring forward the best possible arguments against the GPL and its
application to the current situation. But there aren't any best arguments;
there aren't even any good arguments--and what SCO's lawyer actually said
was arrant, unprofessional nonsense.

According to the Journal, Heise announced that SCO would challenge the
GPL's "legality" on grounds that the GPL permits licensees to
make unlimited copies of programs it covers, while copyright law only
allows a single copy to be made. The GPL, Heise said, "is preempted by
federal copyright law."

This argument is frivolous, by which I mean that it would be a violation of
professional obligation for Heise or any other lawyer to submit it to a
court. If this argument were valid, no copyright license could permit a
licensee to make multiple copies of a licensed program. That would make not
just the GPL "illegal": Heise's supposed theory would also
invalidate the BSD, Apache, AFL, OSL, MIT/X11, and all other free software
licenses.

It would invalidate Microsoft's Shared Source licenses. It would also
eliminate the Redmond, Wash., company's method for distributing its Windows
operating systems, which are preloaded by hard drive manufacturers onto
disk drives that they deliver by the hundreds of thousands to PC
manufacturers. The licenses under which the disk drive and PC manufacturers
make multiple copies of Microsoft's OS would also, according to Heise's
argument, violate the law. Redmond will be surprised. ...
===

 /m

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5